Creeper!

That'ssssa a very nicccsssseeee ssssstuffie I made there....

"Creeper" from the video game Minecraft. 

 No pattern, no pins, all freestyle cutting and sewing..

Sunday Night Stuffies

We watched the last Harry Pottery and I finished Walleye the Walrus.  Awesome!

Saturday Night Stuffies

Lily and I made a polar bear tonight.  My first homemade stuffed animal.  His name is Pablo the Polar Bear. His ears are off kilter (thanks to Lily) and his tail is off center as well (thanks to me) -- he's a scruffy little guy, but the kids absolutely love him, and he taught us a lot about how to make a little friend.  Awesome!

(BTW, he goes to Jill, who thought the Polar Bear looked cute in the book we used.  The kids get to fight over who gets the next one..)

Heading Downriver again...

If the weather holds (I don't care about cold, just rain/snow at this time of year), and it looks like it will, I'll be taking another quick trip on the Mississippi.  Going from Minneapolis to Red Wing, roughly 70 miles.  At the pace of my boat and the lesser currents of autumn, I'm banking on 7 miles per hour for a ten hour trip.   Spreading it over two days I'll find a nice slough to drop anchor for the night and have a nice little wavy night's sleep.  Jill and the kids will meet me in Red Wing -- or any other landing before that point if something doesn't work out according to plan.

I had been saying I didn't do as much boat camping as I'd wanted to this year, and Jill was so supportive of a last little jaunt.  She's awesome!

I'll be boating alone, but filing a travel plan as well as reporting in via social networks.  And the GPS will be on the whole time, I'm sure.  Really looking forward to it!  Me and my boat..

The River

Mine is a small boat. Ok, a Tiny Boat. But I feel like this when I'm on any river:

View Larger Map

You can see that the towboat is pushing hard, but sliding a bit to port (left) so that he can overcompensate on the turn.

The science museum of Minnesota has a towboat/barge simulator that looks like a fun video game. I mean, it's just driving a slow boat down a river right? The moment a kid steps up to it they're excited, but by the first river bend they're shoving those barges up on the beach.

So I step up, never having played, and simply apply my "slow boat, takes a long time to respond, think about the *next* bend" logic and I took the barge and boat through downtown and on to the end of the simulation. I was quite proud of myself.

It would be months later that I would apply these rules in the real world with my boat on the river in some more "technical" (read: crazy wind, currents, and waves) waters and I really understood the intensity of the river.

So now when I see this picture in google maps of this tow pushing sideways up a bend, it just makes me really appreciate what's going on so much more. And makes me want to make another voyage...

This.

Don't Ask Don't Tell is over. Now watch what happens. Hard to argue against something if the military has accepted it.

Life As We Knew It (book series)

Jill (in her saintly way) tutors kids at a local school and one of the classes she stops in at was reading this book. So she got to hear the teacher reading snippets and was curious to know what the whole book was like. I found her copy lying around and, thinking it was a book club book, read the back cover to find out what they were reading this month.

Much to my surprise I was pulled in immediately. Apocalypse? The common man? Perfect! In reading some online reviews it was quite positive and most comments said they literally couldn't put it down. Got about a quarter of the way through it one night and the following night I was kept awake finishing it. You can't stop reading. You just can't. I was reading it on my Nook Color, which I love. Initially got it to hack and turn into an Android tablet, but I use it stock as an eReader. Lovely!

The book is actually teen fiction, but it's really quite dark. Told from the perspective of a girl as diary entries, it's pretty tame but the underlying concept just looms over you and makes you feel like you're a part of the story.

By the two thirds point I was sure I wouldn't be reading the next books in the series. It was too stressful and I just wanted it to be over. I was enjoying it in a "it's the end of the world and nobody feels fine" but I connected so much with the family I felt like my world was ending. It's all common stuff. Electricity, gas, water, food. Everything we take for granted in our lives, and they were slowly disappearing from theirs.

Right up to the last five pages I was done. I just couldn't take it. And when I finished the last paragraph I was trying to figure out if I should get the sample of the next one and just read a couple sentences. But I knew that would involve less sleep that night.

Found the next edition at the Library, online! With a few clicks of a mouse I downloaded it, authorized it on my Nook Color, and now I am all ready to lose more sleep.

Blister Camp, Year Two

This year we headed south to Perrot State Park in Wisconsin. Uriah, Tom Lindsey, Matt, Jared and I headed out at 4ish on Friday and made good time to the park. Set up in the near dark and enjoyed a feast of Hot Dogs and Not Dogs provided by Mrs Uriah, who drove down to secure our site and get firewood.

Today (Saturday) we rode and rode and rode all over southeastern Wisconsin. Lettered roads all around. We stopped in Whitehall for "Beef and Dairy Days" and got to see some real live carnies. Oh and a car show. Did you know that modern cars, when washed and dice hanging from mirrors count as "classic cars" for a car show? Yeah we didn't either.

Dinner after a REALLY LONG WALK was Hammond-esque but pretty good. Except for Uriah, the vegetarian in a rural Wisconsin "nice restaurant" -- they didn't understand. It was all meat, all the time. Except the salad bar with chocolate pudding.

A much quieter fire this evening started later, but Tom made up for it by making the largest fire the massive fire circle could hold. Uriah called it a Sprawling metropolis of fire, I referred to it as a landscape of flame.